I’ve never been very good at keeping journals. I’d always start well, but then I wouldn’t keep it up, and I would leave blank pages to fill in later, and sometimes I would, and sometimes I wouldn’t and … let’s just say that I’ve noted some pages in the third journal...
Thirty-five years ago today, I embarked a trip around the world. My parents had given me the plane ticket as a present after my college graduation, and I had saved money for expenses out of prize money awarded to my senior thesis on Finnegans Wake and from six months...
Among some of my faculty colleagues in New York, NYU Abu Dhabi and the recreation of NYU as a Global Network University remain controversial, if not downright undesirable, projects. Some of my colleagues have gone so far as to engage in e-mail diatribes against those...
Definition: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action (from Merriam-Webster). Example: trying to recycle in Abu Dhabi. Recycling in Abu Dhabi involves taking this...
I first encountered “Petra” as a college student, when I read Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The story’s narrator makes reference to it when he goes to his law offices one weekend and discovers that his inscrutable scrivener Bartleby has been...
On our second day in Africa, we went to Wilson Airport in Nairobi to catch a Safarilink propeller plane to Amboseli National Park, where we stayed at the Amboseli Serena Safari Lodge. Amboseli is 2 degrees 40 ‘ south of the equator, so we were visiting during...
